They burn books, don’t they?
CAN intelligence be banned? Well, those without intelligence think so. In 411 B.C. Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata. The plot is interesting. Original. After all, hasn’t it been said that when we think of a concept or a theme, nothing is original because the Greeks have already done it?
It is the middle of the Peloponnesian War and the women, it appears, are tired already of its effect. Lysistrata thinks of a way to convince the men to stop the war. She believes if the women are to withhold sex from the men, the latter will relent. Sex for abstinence in war; Peace in exchange for a bout in bed. Such freedom in the concept of how to end the war! But the phrase “The glory that was Greece” is appropriate because in 1967, that glorious reputation was tarnished when its government declared the banning of Lysistrata. The reason: the play contains anti-war sentiments.
What was Greece in 1967 onwards? It was under a junta, the ideology of which is described as a right-wing militia.
The fact is banning books is always linked to the kind of government that wants to control information, the act of suppressing knowledge commensurate with what that government wants to achieve over the materials it makes sure will not see the light of day. Governments at times work with other structures, like a religious organization, to stop the publication or release of materials. An example of this are those books that impinge on the interpretations of what other religions deem sacred or important.
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses comes to mind. It has achieved a notoriety that is ideal if one wants to exploit its popularity, but the same book has brought a force greater than any marketing strategy—a fatwa or a death sentence on the author in 1989. Banned in many Islamic states like Iran, Kuwait, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nepal, the nearly widespread banning of the book brought on the realization how religion remains to be the most controlling social structure in society. This kind of religion blurs the boundaries between the state and that form of government, which allows primarily the freedom to choose one’s belief and creates laws to protect the same.
New articles have been written about this fatwa—in 1998 there were reports that Iran was backing away from the edict imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini and yet reports persist how there are parties that have taken up the responsibility to carry on such a punishment.
An enlightening essay by Parveen Akhtar published in The Conversation reviews the political legacy of the said fatwa: “Islamic law stipulates that a fatwa is valid only under the jurisdiction of a Muslim leader and where Sharia law applies.” But according to Akhtar, Rushdie was not an Iranian citizen and he was not also in Iran when the edict was issued.
For Akhtar, Khomeini’s fatwa “was not circumscribed by political boundaries or international relations” as it enjoined all Muslims to kill Rushdie. “The fatwa,” writes Akhtar, “effectively made the whole world Khomeini’s personal polity.” This action was seen as taking away from Saudi Arabia the central focus of the Muslim world.
In the Philippines, book-banning has recently demonstrated a surge. Again, the kind of government made such an illicit and narrow-minded approach viable. This was, remember, the administration ran by a putative strongman who believed in controlling perceptions as to how he handled the day-today running of his puny government. The same government was followed by another led by the son of the martial law dictator who remains the classic case of a mind-control political technician.
Looking at the list now, one shivers at the thought of how men and women can even stop individuals from reading books that they want to read. The book Teatro Political Dos was among the six books identified by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF), or the Commission on the Filipino Language in 2022. The said collection of plays by Malou Jacob includes Anatomiya ng Korupsiyon, which had the sterling record of being performed in government offices as a teaching literature. Ironically, the books that have been categorized as dangerous or inimical to the minds of readers were declared so because of their anti-government views. This position, however, is untenable in a democracy where governments do not only change through elections periodically but are also governments upheld for their mandate to strongly enable people to maintain a respectful but critical view of authorities.
The banning of books reimagines with acuteness a monolithic organization or superstructure whose existence wholly depends on forcing or dominating societies and communities to maintain exactly that—a rigid, filtered, constricted perspective that eschews counterforces or refuses to acknowledge the splendor of differing, discrepant perspectives. The varieties of thoughts and ideas proven to be of necessary import in forming a community of thinking individuals become demonized and we become less of men and women than automaton. What we have in this society featuring bodies assigned to review books being fit or unfit for citizens’ consumption are members who are assigned preferences instead of free choices. This is back to the Garden except this time our Genesis refuses to even show us the Serpent.
How would a festival of books thrive in this dispensation? At the 2nd Bikol Book Festival, Virgilio Almario, National Artist for Literature, read his poem Oda sa Libro (Ode to Book) where one line says: Ipinasusunog ng emperador ang libro/dahil gusto niyang malimot ang kasaysayan,/ipinasusunog ng pasista ang libro/dahil gusto niyang idikta ang kasaysayan (The emperor commands that the book be burned/because he wants to forget history/the fascists asks that the book be burned/because he wants to dictate history.